SIM card hack announced... just enough to scare people

There's news from Security Research Labs making the rounds that a way to hack and clone SIM cards - the subscriber identification modules used in phones and tablets to connect them to voice and data networks - has been discovered and will be expounded upon at a later date. It involves an old DES-56 exploit - Jerry Hildenbrand provides the details over on Android Central - but that's about all that's been disclosed so far. No word on which SIMs, on which carriers.

Reportedly, the exploit only effects a potential 500 million of the over 7 billion SIM cards in general use today, but there's currently no way of knowing which 500 million, so the scare effects everyone. And that sucks.

It's always a tough call figuring out when and how to disclose security exploits, and once it's semi public, it's beyond frustrating, because it means we can't tell you if your iPhone or iPad is effected, or your carrier. Hopefully more information will be made available at the BlackHat Conference next week, and we'll follow up as soon as that happens.